ABSTRACT
This chapter questions the governance structures of the contemporary university, as an entity undergoing neoliberal marketization, by focusing on events that have taken place since 2013 when I first questioned UCL’s decision to accept US$10 million of funding from the mining corporation BHP Billiton to create an International Energy Policy Institute in Adelaide, and the Institute for Sustainable Resources in London at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, of which I was then Vice Dean of Research. A text derived from a public speech, this ‘site-writing’ (Rendell, 2010) is a form of rhetoric, and involves using a number of tools: reason (logos), credibility (ethos), emotion (pathos), and style (lexis). The style of this particular rhetoric is close to what Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti might call a “feminist figuration.” Configured in seven parts, it is told through multiple registers or voices. The first takes an emotional tone, while the second sets out a more reasoned mode of argument, and the third aspect of this rhetoric (its ethos or appeal to credibility) is presented through the company’s own voice as well as those gathered by external risk analysts.
